Issa's dewdrop
We find maturity on this path in the death poems of Buddhist teachers and haiku poets, collected in a recent anthology. Here is one of them, by the nineteenth-century poet Bokkie:
Oh, cuckoo,
I too spit blood-
my thoughts
The cuckoo shows its red mouth when it sings. My thoughts are red like blood, Bokkei is saying. My dying is like the welling up of thoughts, the song of birds - an extraordinary expression of interbeing.
Compare Bokkei's presentation with the famous haiku by Issa, on the death of his baby daughter:
The dewdrop world
is the dewdrop world,
and yet - and yet.
"It is true that this world is transitory," Issa is saying. "All beings are ephemeral. I know this, but when I am faced with the death of my baby girl, I look desperately for something to give me hope and comfort." This is the natural, human way of dealing with anguish, to treat it as an event that was brought forth by implacable exterior circumstances.
Natural - but, Issa, you are not addressing death squarely. There in your grief itself is your emancipation. Your tears are the blood of the universe, coming forth elsewhere in the song of the cuckoo and the darting of geckos. Each breath is truly inspiration and then expiration, life and death. Every day really is a good day.
- Robert Aitken Roshi, Original Dwelling Place.
No comments:
Post a Comment